One administrator. The whole program.

What a Third Party Administrator is for

A TPA — formally a Consortium/Third Party Administrator under DOT rules — runs your drug and alcohol program on your behalf. Not just the testing. The pool, the selections, the collection network, the laboratory relationships, the MRO, the Clearinghouse reporting, the SAP coordination, the recordkeeping and the audit trail.

You remain the employer and the responsibility remains yours. What changes is that a team who do this every day are handling the mechanics, and that the evidence exists when someone asks for it.

The one-stop-shop, meant literally

Most carriers arrive at IPS running three or four vendors: one for testing, one for the Clearinghouse, an MRO service somewhere, a training provider they used once. Each blames the others when something falls through the gap — and things fall through the gap, because nobody owns the whole picture.

Under one administrator, the pre-employment test, the Clearinghouse query, the previous-employer request and the driver qualification record are one workflow. A verified positive automatically triggers the SAP referral, the Clearinghouse report and the follow-up schedule. Nothing waits on someone remembering to tell someone else.

What runs under your account

• DOT drug testing under Part 40 for FMCSA, FAA, FTA, PHMSA and USCG.
• Non-DOT testing on your own panels and policy, kept properly separate.
• Random pool management — consortium or dedicated, with rate monitoring.
• In-house MRO review by a DOT-certified physician on staff.
• Breath alcohol testing through a certified BAT network.
• Clearinghouse registration, C/TPA designation, queries and violation reporting.
• SAP coordination, return-to-duty testing and follow-up schedule management.
• Policy writing, supervisor training and audit support.
• Online portal access to every record, result and invoice.

Why carriers switch to us

Almost always the same story: the previous TPA was cheap, then unreachable. A random deadline slipped. An audit arrived and nobody came. IPS grows on referrals from carriers we already serve — roughly 25 to 30 new clients a year come to us that way — because service, not price, is what people actually talk about.

Switching is free and takes about a day

We request your records from the outgoing administrator, reconcile your driver roster, load your pool, verify your Clearinghouse registration and designation, and issue a compliance certificate. No setup fee, no long-term contract, no gap in coverage. Most programs are live within 24 hours. See Join IPS for exactly what the switch looks like.